More on Mueller’s folly: Rick Gates’ testimony
I know I’ve already written recently about the Manafort trial and Rick Gates’s testimony but I feel the urge to link to this post by streiff at RedState because it contains some tweets with details of the courtroom shenanigans that are mind-bogglingly awful, even knowing what we already know about Gates. He’s one of those people of whom you can safely assume that every word out of his mouth is a lie, including “and” and “the.”
And yet, he’s not just the star witness for the prosecution, he’s apparently the only evidence they’ve got. [ADDITION: to clarify—the only evidence for Manafort’s state of mind, that is, which is a vital element of the charges. There is certainly evidence of financial wrongdoing, but it is Gates who provides the necessary evidence of Gates’ awareness and intent.]
Let that sink in: the only evidence [clarification: of Manafort’s state of mind] is the testimony of this incredibly mendacious person who’s been embezzling from Manafort and is testifying in order to substantially lighten his own sentence.
Manafort may be guilty as the day is long (I have no idea if he is or isn’t), but on the basis of this trial he should be freed and receive an abject apology from Mueller.
That won’t happen, of course.
If you follow that link and read the trajectory of the trial and the testimony of Gates, it is an admission of financial crime after financial crime, fraud after fraud, and lie after lie (including lies to the investigators). A regular sociopath of the finance world (which is perhaps, unfortunately, not altogether unusual). He also can’t seem to recall much of anything till he’s confronted with his own prior statements to authorities. What a witness, what a guy.
Here’s one of my favorite parts, if “favorite” is the right word:
Now Manafort's lawyer goes for blood.
Defense: After all the lies you told and fraud you've committed, you expect this jury to believe you?
Gates: Yes.
Defense: Uncorroborated?
Gates: Yes. pic.twitter.com/5IOleZAaRl
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) August 8, 2018
This guy gives corruption a bad name.
[NOTE: Although I used the term “Mueller’s folly” in the title of this post, that doesn’t mean I’m saying Mueller will lose the case. I’m saying the case is so bad he should lose it.]
[ADDENDUM: In a somewhat related Mueller matter, Rudy Giuliani hints that America will soon discover some bombshell information about the collusion investigation that will completely discredit it and Mueller in a major way. I have my doubts; we’ve heard that sort of thing before.]
[ADDENDUM II: Whatever happens in this Virgina-based case against Manafort—the tax fraud and bank fraud case—there is a second case Mueller has planned for him, concentrating on money laundering and failure to register as a foreign agent, and due to take place in DC. This post is about the present case only.]
Again, Gates has perjured himself and done so more than once. In soliciting that testimony, Mueller is guilty of suborning perjury.
I’ll be surprised if Gates is charged with perjury and astonished if Mueller is prosecuted for suborning perjury.
Ironically, there is obstruction of justice at play but it rests with the prosecution.
I noted yesterday that Mueller and company are third raters who only succeed when the deck is stacked in their favor. That seems to be wildly over generous after yesterday’s testimony.
If this Gates dude turns out to be as bad an apple as it looks like he is, and if a[nother] scandal erupts -slash- is manufactured as a result, do we consumers of news get to refer to said scandal as Gates-gate?
In an honest just world…Mueller would be horsewhipped, tarred & feathered along with about 2/3 of the Democrat office holders in DC.
And bloody 44 & Hillary would be in jail.
Setting aside Gates questionable, at best, testimony, there are several uncontested charges that will put him away according to Gene Rossi who appeared on Maddow’s show Wednesday night. Rossi is a former federal prosecutor from the Eastern District of Virginia who has been sitting in on the trial. He has appeared before the judge in this case many times, knows the defense attorneys, and seems to be a straight shooter. He also represents one of the 8 witnesses, the one who is not going to be called. The other witnesses were supposed to testify today and Friday. Here is a clip from the show. You judge, starting at about 5 minutes in:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/manafort-defense-has-been-dealt-horrible-cards-former-prosecutor-1295223363769
To clarify, the “him” that will be put away according to Rossi, is Manafort, not Gates.
Somewhere Laventri Beria is laughing ..
I want this trial to blow up in team Mueller’s faces; but that may be impossible considering where the trial is being held. However, it takes just one juror to gum up the works. Fortunately, the presiding judge seems a bit exasperated with the Mueller team. We’ll see.
OT i just discovered an english word kowtow today which i believe is a borrowed word from the chinese language meaning an subordinate doing an extreme bowing to his superior with his head going all the way down to touching the floor (something obama used to do all the time to foreign dictators) is that a commonly used word in American culture? If I use it in a sentence communicating will that word be understood by most native English speakers?
Dave,
The concept of kowtow is well know to those of us who have been immersed in Asian martial arts. Sensei demands your total concentration and will correct you relentlessly. You will not become a first degree black belt in 3 years. Gradually you learn over many years, at least 6 to test for shodan, first degree black belt.Then the sensei becomes your benefactor and the relationship between student and master becomes less harsh and more benevolent. Under Japanese masters that takes 10-15 years dependent on your abilities. If you want the skill/knowledge you accept those terms. You have to seek out real masters beyond the strip mall pretenders.
Let that sink in: the only evidence is the testimony of this incredibly mendacious person who’s been embezzling from Manafort and is testifying in order to substantially lighten his own sentence.
If you read the tweets, it’s actually much worse than this. At every point in the investigation, Gates has been caught lying. He lied before the embezzlement (obviously), but he got caught lying to Mueller’s team during his plea deal, and then got caught lying a couple of times during his testimony to this court!
At the end of hearing all that, he said that the jury should believe him without corroboration. LOL
Dave:
In my generation they would certainly be quite familiar with the word. Maybe not the physical meaning of bowing all the way to the floor, but the basic meaning is well understood.
I have no idea what the younger generation knows or doesn’t know.
The Other Chuck on August 9, 2018 at 7:26 pm at 7:26 pm said:
Setting aside Gates questionable, at best, testimony, there are several uncontested charges that will put him away according to Gene Rossi who appeared on Maddow’s show Wednesday night.
You’re funny.
First by quoting anything on Maddow’s show. She’s the left’s Alex Jones.
Secondly, if Mueller had iron-clad charges against Manafort that could put him away, he would be jeopardizing his case by putting this fool on the stand. He never would’ve called him to testify, and the press wouldn’t keep referring to him as the “star witness.”
Mueller has no more than what we’ve seen, and that’s almost nothing.
Matt_SE:
Don’t blame Gates for the stupidity of his answers. Blame him for his crimes, which apparently are manifold. But his lines are being fed to him by Team Mueller. They apparently believe the jury is stupid, or so consumed with Trump-hatred that they will convict Manafort on the basis of this betraying, lying, cheating scumbag’s testimony alone.
Huh? I’ve heard the opposite: they could convict even without Gates.
That makes more sense because it’s a document case. Manafort didn’t report $30M in income. He didn’t pay taxes on that income. He failed to report foreign bank accounts and foreign assets.
We don’t need Gates to tell us that. It’s all there on paper. Manfort’s accountants testified against him.
My understanding is that Gates comes in because Manafort is claiming it’s all Gates’ doing. They can’t prove that but they’re hoping that hits the “reasonable doubt” standard.
That sounds like a far-fetched theory to most observers; “Hey some criminal is committing crimes for my benefit and i didn’t know!” Be that as it may, the paper trail shows that Manafort knew (for example, his passport was used to open foreign accounts, even when his name was not on them).
Manju:
But that’s the point—it’s he-said/he-said.
If, for example, there is nothing that says who was the person who did it with knowledge and criminal intent—which, after all, is a major element of the crime—and if Gates says Manafort did that and Manafort says Gates did it, then who does a juror believe? There is no other evidence of who was responsible and knowledgeable.
Now, I haven’t followed the trial and all the evidence at all closely. But I am going on the transcript, which I assume you read, where the defense says do you expect the jury to just believe you, uncorroborated? The question refers to knowledge and intent and responsibility—is it Gates’, Manaforts’, or both?
There is also a second trial (on different charges) which hasn’t even begun yet. The present one is in Virginia and the second is in DC. The present one is about bank and tax fraud; the DC one is about money laundering and not registering as a foreign agent. Gates doesn’t have anything to do with the second trial’s charges, as far as I know. So Manafort could be convicted on any of those charges. I don’t think he’ll skate after all of this—unless of course he ends up giving Mueller what he wants and implicates Trump in something that either actually happened, or something that is trumped up (couldn’t resist the pun).
I think that if Mueller and company thought the Virginia case was airtight without Gates they would never have risked putting Gates on the stand. His history and motives work against the prosecution, IMHO. It’s my understanding that the other evidence in the case (besides Gates’ testimony) is the paper trail. Something happened; the papers show it. The question is: what did Manafort know? What did Manafort intend? Only Gates is testifying about that. Knowledge and intention are elements of the crimes for which Manafort is being tried in Virginia. [I added a clarification in the post on this.]
Now, the jury is free to believe that even though Gates is a lying scumbug, he’s not lying about Manafort, who is also a scumbag. But they need to believe Gates in order to believe that Manafort’s intent and knowledge has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Manafort is facing 100 years of prison. I find that astounding in terms of what he actually did, even if all the charges are true. It seems exceedingly excessive to me; many murderers get off far more lightly. But the point of it all is to get Manafort to “pull a Gates” only this time against Trump. If Manafort is convicted, he gets a chance to do that prior to the sentencing.
That’s why Manafort is being overcharged and treated in such a Draconian manner. And that’s why the prosecution–which originally had charged Gates with the same crimes and the possibility of the same penalties—offered Gates a deal if he would talk, a deal that allows him anything from zero jail time to something like 10 years maximum. Pretty sweet deal, compared to 100 + years, right? And yet Manafort faces the 100+ year sentence possibility.
That might work if a car is stolen. But in this case it’s Manafort’s own income that went unreported. It’s his own taxes that went unpaid.
Gates’ testimony being uncorroborated isn’t the same as his testimony being the only evidence. And a defense attorney asking him is a jury should believe him even in the event that his testimony is uncorroborated, doesn’t mean his testimony is actually uncorroborated.
Is this what it’s come down to, defending the scum that Trump surrounds himself with? He sure does know how to pick them, the Omarosas, Bannons, Cohens, and Manaforts.
He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.
Consider the complexity of the tax code and the recent change allowing companies to bring cash back from overseas if they pay taxes. Perhaps the defense will suggest that they thought that money earned overseas is not taxable until it is returned to the states.
Yes, it is a stretch, but depending on the jury,it might be enough for reasonable doubt for someone.
The Other Chuck:
Oh please. There were plenty of decent people, too, in the campaign. And there are a lot of scumbags in DC. They don’t call it “the swamp” for nothing. Hard NOT to hire quite a few. Plus, a lot of more conventionally-minded people didn’t want to work for Trump; hated him and figured he would lose anyway so why bother.
And he fired Manafort pretty quickly.
However, even scumbags are entitled to fair trials.
Manju:
I have read other sources (Andrew McCarthy, for example) who say the intent part of the case rests entirely on Gates’ say-so. Doesn’t mean Manafort won’t be convicted, of course. But as I said, Gates was necessary because he is the source of the evidence for that element of the crime.
I’m pretty sure that Manafort doesn’t fill out his own tax return. He signs it, but he doesn’t prepare it. Here are some more details of Gates’ testimony [emphasis mine]:
He is there to testify to Manafort’s state of mind. The rest of the evidence the prosecution introduced as to Manafort’s state of mind consists of tax documents and the like, from which someone might certainly conclude that Manafort must have known or should have known, but there is nothing that tells anyone what he actually did know or did intend. Only Gates gives that information, and that information is supposedly necessary in order to find Manafort guilty.
One of the most important facts about Gates is not just that, if what he says about Manafort is indeed true, then Gates is just as guilty as Manafort of the same crimes Manafort is being tried for, although that is true. The important thing is that Gates was screwing Manafort, embezzling money from him. It doesn’t just demonstrate that he’s a liar and a crook, it demonstrates that, despite being Manafort’s partner (and, apparently, his protege), Gates had no reluctance to screw Manafort over and betray him. And that was before Mueller even got to him and put the screws on him. He was a viper in regard to Manafort even before they were caught. So how on earth can we think he would have a single moment of reluctance to lie about Manafort and stab him in the back now that he (Gates) can get out of a potential 100-year prison term by doing so?
This is also quite interesting, although of course its meaning can be interpreted in several ways:
If you read this, too, it really appears that Gates was handling the paperwork, supposedly (according to him) doing all the shady stuff at Manafort’s request. But the “at Manaford’s request” part is just because Gates says it was. Now, perhaps there’s a lot more that doesn’t appear in these newspaper articles. But the articles I’ve read indicate that Gates was doing all the nitty gritty, talking with the accountants and making the wire transfers—as well as simultaneously defrauding Manafort.
I think that this headline summarizes it rather nicely: “Rick Gates says he lied for years at Paul Manafort’s request and stole from him in the process”:
So Gates is a habitual liar and criminal, defrauding everyone (not just Manafort), and yet certain crimes—the ones for which prosecutors wish to convict Manafort—he only did at Manafort’s direction. One could certainly conclude, though, that he needed no such encouragement or direction.
And I think that this is really the heart of the matter [emphasis mine]:
As I wrote earlier, it seems that Manafort delegated many of these tasks to Gates. And Gates was a criminal. Why should we believe Gates when he says “the devil Manafort made me do it”?
Do we have any indication Manafort was a habitual criminal, doing things like this even before he met Gates and put him in charge of a lot of this stuff? I don’t think so; at least, I’ve never read anything to that effect (and failing to register as a lobbyist does not count in terms of habitual criminality). And yet Gates has been committing crime crime after crime on his own for much of his life, including crimes against Manafort, crimes involving finances. You might say it’s his specialty. This absolutely stinks as testimony.
Gates is Uriah Heep, minus the ‘umbleness:
Not a perfect analogy by any means, but Uriah Heep is what Gates keeps bringing to mind for me.
The focus on Manafort has been to tight recently, that other developments in the Mueller probe have gone unremarked here (there is really just too much going on!) so I though I would bring up a couple of articles about the other players in the game.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/08/02/why-peter-strzok-wanted-to-keep-declassification-authority-when-he-moved-to-mueller-team/
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/08/09/why-it-matters-that-dossier-author-steele-tried-unsuccessfully-to-become-a-source-for-mueller-probe/
http://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/400810-opinion-how-a-senior-justice-official-helped-dems-on-trump-russia-case
Also, do not forget that the Democrats never let a crisis go to waste, even (especially) if they are the ones who created the crisis in the first place.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/08/09/u-s-senator-has-plan-for-government-to-take-over-social-media-because-russia/
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/obama-breaks-his-silence/565421/
The broad themes of Obama’s speech, meanwhile, left little doubt about the targets of his criticism. He touched on the erosion of a consensus on what constitutes facts; “news cycles [that bring] more head-spinning and disturbing headlines”; and the threat of a “return to an older, more dangerous, more brutal way of doing business.”
“People just make stuff up. They just make stuff up. We see it in the growth of state-sponsored propaganda. We see it in internet fabrications. We see it in the blurring of lines between news and entertainment,” Obama said. “We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more. It used to be that if you caught them lying, they’d be like, ‘Oh, man’— now they just keep on lying.”
* * *
Neo’s readers can draw their own conclusions about Obama’s accusations.
Why does anybody besides the most hard core legal beagle even care about this trial? To me its just about a guy who laundered a lot of money. There must be hundreds of other people currently on trial for money laundering. I know Mueller is prosecuting this case, but it has nothing to do with The President or with the task Mueller, as Special Prosecutor, was originally given.
Doug Purdie:
People care about the case for three reasons. The first is that they don’t like to see differential justice. Why is Manafort being pursued so assiduously and Gates getting off free or relatively free? The second is the broad scope of the Mueller probe. On a bunch of cooked-up “evidence” and some leaked cooked-up “evidence,” Mueller was appointed with an exceptionally broad charge and powers to investigate just about anyone and everything connected with Trump or Russia. Manafort was swept up in that net, even though these charges had zero to do with Trump. The third is that many people suspect (and the judge in this case has suggested) that Manafort is only being prosecuted in order to get him to implicate Trump in some wrongdoing in exchange for a much reduced sentence, much as Gates was pressured to implicate Manafort in exchange for a much reduced sentence.
“…even care about..”
Fair question, I guess. Let’s try this:
Because it’s NOT about justice.
Because it’s about a soft coup d’état against a legally-elected POTUS.
Because it’s about successfully turning the American justice system into a Stalinist kangaroo court—with the enthusiastic (to the point of rabid) participation of people who consider themselves good, decent, law-abiding, patriotic, liberal Americans, ginned up to the point of hysteria by a media who believe their moral imperative, their job!, is to destroy this presidency.
Because it’s about demonizing and destroying people associated with POTUS in order to ultimately implement the soft coup d’état and bring down the supposed monster that occupies the Oval Office.
Because it’s about enshrining extraordinary hypocrisy as the highest ethical value of the nation—a nation that apparently, to the deep sorrow and anger of all those good, decent, etc. people—has not been sufficiently “fundamentally transformed”.
Because it’s about disenfranchising those voters who had enough of eight years of such “fundamental transformation”; who had enough of an administration that gleefully categorized Americans as “stupid”, an administration that proudly trumpeted its purportedly clever use of lies and “echo chambers” (together with willing confederates) to ram through its policies, and administration that exulted in its deceptions and “Executive Actions” to bypass Congressional oversight.
Etc.
One might imagine that this might attract the attention of a few people (give or take) on either side of the aisle…. (Or maybe not.)